Patricia Potter (52 page)

“The attorney’s office,” he remembered with the barest of interest.

“Yes.”

“Do you enjoy it?”

Lisa realized that they hadn’t talked about her much at all. He had asked about her family, particularly about her mother, but he had never really asked about her own ambitions, her own dreams. He had dazzled her with anecdotes and stories of his own life and career, but he had never asked her about her own. Strange that she had not realized it until now.

“Yes,” she said. “Very much.” She did. She liked Kelly most of all. She had not seen him outside the office since they’d had dinner with Mr. Chandler, and she realized how much she missed him.

Kurt watched as she smiled, but her eyes were far away and he sensed she was thinking of someone else, possibly her escort the other evening who was, he now knew, also her boss. He felt the anger growing inside, but he stifled it with the briefest of smiles. “I too have some business tonight,” he said. “But I must thank you for making the last few days so very pleasant.”

“For me too,” Lisa said politely. They had ended the day with dinner at the Cloister, and she felt faintly guilty that he had taken her to lunch, then dinner, and he was getting little in return. Yet she wanted to go home. She wanted it very badly.

The drive back was uncomfortable. Kurt was unusually silent, preoccupied, as they drove across the causeway. It was near dark, the setting sun casting great streamers of gold over the marsh waters. Her favorite time of day. She looked at him to see whether he also appreciated the almost ethereal beauty of the evening.

But he was stiff, his lips tight, and both his hands busy on the steering wheel. He had changed completely from the amusing, attentive escort of this morning.

When they reached the house, he took her to the door, kissed her lightly, even indifferently, and promised to call her Tuesday.

“Have a good trip,” she said, in lieu of anything more personal.

He smiled for the first time since dinner. “I will. Thank you for a fine day.”

Lisa watched him turn and walk back to the Mercedes, and wondered why she didn’t feel disappointment or regret. She knew he wouldn’t call again, and she was glad. The car disappeared down the road before she opened the door. Her mother was inside, reading, and she looked up quickly with a smile too bright.

“Did you have a good time?”

Lisa hesitated. For some reason, she still didn’t feel comfortable confiding in her mother. Yet it was only the two of them now, and she sensed her mother needed her as much as she needed her mother. In the past few weeks, her mother had seemed more approachable, more vulnerable, less certain perhaps and more human.

“No,” she said quite honestly and knew a certain satisfaction when her mother’s eyebrows went up in surprise.

“Why?” Meara said with sudden worry. Had Kurt Weimer…?

But Lisa just shrugged. “I don’t know. It was interesting, but I think I missed Kelly.”

Nothing her daughter could have said would have delighted Meara more. “I was wondering when you would recognize that,” she said with a slight grin.

Lisa looked at her quizzically. “What do you mean?”

“Nothing, love,” Meara said. “Just that Kelly is a very nice person.”

“He is, isn’t he?” Lisa said with just a little grin of her own, a sharing grin that warmed Meara’s heart. “I kept thinking how I would rather eat oysters than baked Alaska. Do you think there’s something wrong with me?”

“I don’t think so. I like oysters better myself.”

Lisa smiled at her mother, who smiled back, a bit of a choking sensation in her throat.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

T
HE HALL WAS
filling rapidly, and the level of noise was making it hard to concentrate.

Chris had arrived early and stationed himself close to the main doors. Several other men, all with watchful eyes, were doing the same. He recognized the same look that Sanders Evans had, and he had little doubt they were FBI or some other police agency.

He had flown to Atlanta in his private plane. Upon arrival, he had sought out a used-clothing store and purchased a workman’s uniform of cheap blue trousers, dark shirt, and cotton jacket. As an afterthought, he stopped at another store and purchased an Atlanta Crackers baseball cap, pulling it over his hair. Kurt, he imagined, would wear similar clothes.

The pants and jacket were baggy enough to hide his gun in a tightly fitted belt holster, although he suspected, given the occasion, there would be many other weapons there tonight. He also had a miniature camera given him by Matt.

Matt had not liked the idea of his client attending the meeting. He and his associates could handle it without interference from an amateur. He had not expressed his feelings in those exact words, but the implication was there.

Chris was tired of sitting and waiting—allowing Kurt Weimer to make all the moves. He remembered everything from his German Intelligence training years ago, a past of which Matt and Ben Markham were totally ignorant. He knew he could handle himself in nearly any situation, and after working on a freighter and as a lumberjack, he also had no doubt that he could fit right into the mostly blue-collar crowd at the White Citizens Brotherhood tonight.

As the audience streamed inside in larger numbers than he’d expected, he took stock of them while pretending to glance at a tabloid publication whose masthead sported a symbol resembling a swastika. Its front page featured a twisted body hanging from a branch, an old photo of a Jewish businessman accused and lynched years earlier of killing a young girl employee.

The whole scene was all too familiar to him. Those attending, with the exception of obvious media representatives and law enforcement officers, could have been brownshirts, the violent arm of the Nazi party, twenty-five years earlier in Germany. Mostly burly men with disgruntled expressions, they were, on the whole, largely people who had failed in honest competition and were now looking for scapegoats to blame—blacks or Jews or Asians. It didn’t matter. Anyone who was different was an enemy. Chris could smell the violence, the hostility, the pent-up anger, and he shivered with the feeling of déjà vu.

He had tried these many years to block out those memories, to forget that he had ever been a part of it, that he had in a small way defended a society built on hate. Kurt Weimer was trying to bring it back.

Almost on cue, he spied the man. Only the arrogant walk betrayed him. Had not Chris spent the night before studying a photograph of Weimer and guessing possible ways the man might try to disguise himself, he might not have spotted him. Weimer too was dressed in old clothes, but he had also donned some thick glasses through which the eyes were almost completely eclipsed, and his hair was slicked back under a trucker’s cap.

Weimer entered amidst a large compact group and artfully turned his face to say something as he passed a gauntlet of federal agents. Chris brought up the cigarette lighter which hid the camera and snapped several photos as he looked for some of Matt’s agents. He didn’t recognize anyone, and he wondered whether Weimer had given them the slip after all.

Chris followed Weimer and took a seat several rows behind and at an angle where he could take more pictures. Once more he curiously studied the other people in the audience. There were some women and children, most of whom also wore looks of perennial dissatisfaction and discontent. There were even a few Ku Klux Klan robes. What was really surprising to him, and dismaying, was that the hall was fuller than he expected.

The meeting opened with a prayer, an ironic twist, he thought, when followed by a speaker who launched into a litany of hate, blaming every conceivable injustice or wrong on minorities.

“We have to protect our wives and daughters,” the speaker said with a roar of rage and approval from the audience.

Chris listened in disbelief as nonsense after nonsense drew huge hands and shouts of agreement. Weimer’s head was tipped upward in a pose of complete absorption.

The one sign of hope in the sea of radiating hatred was the skeptical, even amused looks of the media who were scribbling in notebooks. Germany thirty years ago had no such spotlight, and when Hitler assumed control of the newspapers, there was no one to expose the mania taking root and growing so rapidly, spreading like some terrible epidemic.

No matter what Weimer planned, it would never succeed, not now, not today, not here. But that was small comfort at the moment.

When Robert Cannon, a young man whose energy vibrated with every step, strode confidently on stage, Chris saw Weimer’s body tense, and he knew instinctively that this man was why Weimer had come, and he turned his full attention to the featured speaker.

Unlike the others, Cannon spoke in reasoned terms and a soft voice, his appeal aimed at patriotism rather than the outright hatred espoused by earlier speakers. It was a masterpiece in staging, the crowd already primed and excited while this man took what, for this group, was the high road: protection of American values, of families, of community. Once more, Chris felt he was reliving a horror as he watched the almost glazed expressions of fanaticism. This man could be dangerous, given respectability and money. He felt sick as he realized that this was exactly why Kurt Weimer had taken such chances tonight, and no longer were Meara and Lisa the only important issues.

Chris waited until Weimer left the auditorium. He followed at a distance, watching as another man, a better-dressed man, joined him briefly. Chris took another photo and saw the two disappear out a side door.

Should he go after him? He still didn’t recognize any of Matt’s people, but then he didn’t know them all. But he was afraid to risk the film if he continued to follow Weimer. His hand went to the small of his back where his pistol was holstered. He might not have another chance, not like this one.

Then he saw two more men move purposefully out the same side door and debated whether they were Matt’s people, bodyguards for the leader of the Brotherhood, or even federal agents, although he doubted the last. But they had the feral look of hunters, of predators. In any event, he doubted whether he could accomplish anything now. There were simply too many people around. Cursing silently to himself, he nonetheless used the side door and saw Weimer and the men he’d left with enter a nondescript car.

Chris stood there and lit a cigarette, and then with heavy steps he turned away. There had to be another time, another opportunity. In the meantime, he had the photos. There would be some people very, very interested in them.

He hailed a taxi and asked about a late night restaurant and was delivered to a place called the Varsity. He then called Matt, who was supervising his case. There was a long pause when he identified himself.

“We lost him,” Matt said.

“I didn’t,” Chris replied matter-of-factly.

There was another pause. Chris could almost hear the silent chagrin over the phone. But it didn’t matter. Nothing mattered now but the film he had.

“He did go to the Brotherhood meeting then?” Matt said finally, knowing his boss was going to have his head for this. An amateur succeeding where his own men had failed. It made him wonder even more about his mysterious client. “After our two people realized he had somehow left the hotel, they went to the rally but couldn’t find him.” Or you, Matt wanted to add.

“His own mother wouldn’t have recognized him,” Chris said comfortingly.

“Then how did you—?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Chris said, his voice suddenly curt. “But I do have some film I want developed tonight.”

“Where are you?”

Chris had already obtained the address. He read it off.

“Someone will be there in less than an hour.”

“I want it by midmorning.”

“You’ll have it,” Matt said. And any other damn thing you want, he almost added. He’d probably be back doing divorce cases after this. “Delivered to your door.”

Chris hung up, ordered a hamburger, and wandered through the various rooms of the large drive-in restaurant. Each room had a television set tuned to a different station, and patrons sat before them in school-like desks. He noticed the news coming on one channel, and he settled his long rangy form in one of the awkward seats. He listened carefully to the news. Two black students had been admitted to the University of Georgia for the first time, and there were widespread protests and threats. Then there was a brief report on the White Citizens Brotherhood rally.

The cameras had not been allowed inside, but they had panned people going in, and the reporter had been admitted. In a few terse sentences, he estimated the size of the crowd at approximately seven hundred and repeated several of the most memorable quotes. To someone who had not seen the rapt faces inside, they sounded ludicrous and melodramatic. But taken in context with the next report, a new outbreak of violence in Mississippi, it was all too familiar and ominous to Chris.

After the news went off, he slumped back in the chair. He would probably get a hotel room tonight and leave at sunrise. He was tired and uncertain. He had the ammunition he needed now to confront Weimer, but could be withhold it from American authorities? Or would he be betraying both his native and adopted countries by allowing Weimer to continue?